Good decision making is key to the success of any business, so don't leave it
to chance.

Every SME chief executive has to make dozens of decisions every day, from deciding which acquisition to make or which finance director to hire; to choosing where to locate a new factory or which new products to start selling. Here's how to improve your chances of making sure that the decisions you make are the right decisions:

1. Put your thinking down on paper. Write down the options, the things you need to take into consideration, the implications; all of it. It doesn't have to be neat - doodles, maps and diagrams are fine and can actually be more useful. You will get a much clearer view of the big picture if it is in front of you and not just inside your head, and you can refer back to it.

2. Be obsessive about collecting high quality useful data from your business on an ongoing basis. Without good information to work from it can be hard to know if you are making the right decisions - and even harder to tell whether a decision was the right one or not.

3. Work out what your long term objectives are in making this decision and understand what you are ultimately trying to achieve from it. While one option may seem to deliver more benefits in the short term, another option may fulfil the longer term objectives you need.

4. Make sure you are making your own decision and not the decision that someone else wants you to make. Isla Wilson, founder of business consultancy Ruby Star Associates, said: "The biggest challenge is to make a decision that is yours and not someone else's. There can be a huge amount of peer-pressure on a small business to adopt the latest big thing, or to do things in a particular way - but you must resist."

5. Give yourself room to make a decision. Whenever Heather Frankham, the founder of Lifetime Training, one of the UK's largest apprenticeship training providers, has to make a big decision, she takes a solitary walk round the Downs in Bristol. She then allows herself to mull over the different options until she reaches a certain lamp post - at which point she either makes a decision or realises she lacks enough information to be able to make one. She says: "It is about creating the space to make a decision."

6. Make sure you really understand the risks associated with choosing each possible option - and the risks associated with not choosing it. You can't, and shouldn't avoid risk entirely - but you do need to ensure that you are only taking risks that you and your business can live with.

7. Acknowledge your gut feeling about which option to choose, but make sure you subject it to the same objective analysis as the other possible options to ensure that it still stacks up. Subject each possible option to a SWOT analysis, listing its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

8. Sleep on it. Your brain will continue to mull over the decision to be made even when you are not consciously thinking about it, so giving it time to cogitate may give you useful insights.

John Maule, Professor of Human Decision making at Leeds University Business School, said: "I am a great believer in sleeping on a problem because people's emotional states affects their thinking. The nice thing about it is that you wake up the next day in a different emotional state and that is likely to lead you to think about different things."

And finally - never put off making decisions that need making. Even a poor decision is better than no decision at all because at least it gives you something to work with. A leader who is incapable of making decisions will quickly lose the respect of his team, and the business will suffer.